‘Porn shouldn’t have a monopoly on sex’

French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie makes a controversial splash with “Stranger by the Lake” (released in France June 12), a slow burn of a thriller about sex, desire and murder among a group of gay men. Here’s our interview with the director.

When it premiered at Cannes last month, French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie’s “Stranger by the Lake” (“L’inconnu du lac”) had festival goers buzzing for days.

Set along the sun-dappled shores of a lake in southeastern France, the film is a slow-building, meticulously crafted, fully engrossing thriller about a gay man’s infatuation with a moustachioed stud who may be a cold-blooded murderer. As provocative for the ideas about desire, transgression and narcissism that it examines as for its graphic scenes of man-on-man coupling, “Stranger by the Lake” earned Guiraudie the Best Director prize in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes.

Just days before “Stranger by the Lake” hits French theatres (it will be released later this year in the US), FRANCE 24 sat down with Guiraudie, whose unassuming manner and sing-song Southern accent belie an acute sense of artistic purpose.

Here are some highlights.

F24: “Stranger by the Lake” offers a rather bleak vision of the gay community, in which physical desire takes precedence over everything – including moral considerations. Did you intend the film as a commentary on the gay community specifically, or could it have been about heterosexuals?

AG: I actually tried to write the screenplay about heterosexuals, but it didn’t work. So the idea became to explore a world I know. For me, making movies is about mixing personal experience with something more universal, more linked to collective human experience.

The film in some ways stems from my own past sexual liberation as a gay man, when I discovered a sort of sexual utopia, a world of pleasure and liberty, without the engagements that heterosexual couples faced. There was no risk of anyone getting pregnant, for example, so there was far less pressure surrounding sex.

But I started to realise, little by little, that this sexual liberation was becoming a sort of quest for sexual ecstasy at any price. The question that haunts the film is: where is this relentless search for pleasure leading us? There’s that very guilt-inducing moment in the movie when the inspector asks the protagonist: “What are you all doing? One of you has been killed, we found the body, and yet you continue as if nothing happened?”

AG: Personally, I think marriage is ancient Judeo-Christian nonsense. That said, I would never speak out against the movement for marriage equality. I didn’t take any public stance – though I would not have been opposed to it, if asked – but I did end up getting involved a bit and marching in a few of the demonstrations in favour of gay marriage and adoption when I saw the staunch opposition. That’s what made me react. I didn’t expect the opponents of gay marriage to be so virulent.

AG: I certainly would never distance myself from it. In any case, when you make a movie featuring naked men having sex with one another near a lake, the “gay” label is unavoidable.

My ambition in making this film was also to re-visit how sex is portrayed onscreen. My idea was to re-integrate graphic sex scenes into a real story, with dialogue and everything. I wanted to show that porn shouldn't have a monopoly on sexually explicit content.

Alain Guiraudie ® Cannes Film Festival

But if we’re talking about a renewal of “Queer cinema” in France, that supposes there was already a “Queer cinema” here, and I’m not sure that’s true. We have François Ozon and André Téchiné [two openly gay French filmmakers whose work often deals with gay themes].

I think French cinema is just starting to move beyond the point where homosexuality is a sociological subject in and of itself – and it was certainly time to leave “La Cage aux Folles” [the original French film remade by US filmmaker Mike Nichols as “The Birdcage”] behind.

Part of the problem may be that there aren’t that many gay filmmakers in France. Maybe if there had been a more prominent gay French director in the New Wave movement – a French Fassbinder or Pasolini – things would be different.

F24: Several US critics have called “Stranger by the Lake” Hitchcockian. Is he one of your references? Who are the filmmakers who inspire you?

AG: Hitchcock is so much a part of today’s cultural fabric that even if he’s not a direct influence on me, his work has had an impact. I still watch his movies regularly.

AG: I’ve already written the screenplay, but I need to rework it. Obviously, after “Stranger by the Lake”, things are no longer the same. I think I dug a little deeper in “Stranger by the Lake”, and so this new project may end up being more ambitious than I initially envisioned.

It’s the story of a young manager sent by a big industrial group to close down a small milk factory in rural France. But the workers resist, and he decides to join them – especially since he falls in love with a slightly crazy man who works at the factory.